The Pirate Bay flees from authorities, vowing to return

The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious BitTorrent tracker, was unavailable on Monday after a court ordered a leading Swedish ISP to block access. But some users were able to reach the site again just hours later.

The order by a Swedish district court came months after the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay (where free versions of copyrighted movies, games, software and music can be found) were found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement and ordered to be jailed for a year each pending an appeal.

After the April trial in Stockholm, the Hollywood movie studios urged the court to close The Pirate Bay. Yesterday they did so... or tried to, anyway.

A few hours after the block was enacted, former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde encouraged users to refresh their DNS cache to get a new internet IP address for the Bay.

Some users reported success at the new address, which is registered to DCP Networks, a company owned by convicted Pirate Bay financier Frederick Neij. But by 7.30pm BST, it too was unreachable by Wired, as was the company website. A cat-and-mouse game appears to be unfolding.

Sunde puts his money on the mouse. Or is that the cat? Anyway, he says the Pirate Bay will prevail.

"Some of the most talented network people in the world have been working with the site, with a tremendous threat from the most corrupt and powerful corporations in the world," Sunde wrote in an email. "A plan B (and C, D, E and F) is always in existence."

The developments were days ahead of the potential sale of the site to Global Gaming Factory, which was to transform it into a pay-to-play venue for content. CEO Hans Pandeya is apparently unfazed by the court-ordered outage of a website he's about to pay $8.5 million to acquire.